A few weeks ago I posted about Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point.  In that book, Gladwell was posing the argument that social epidemics (of all varieties) can usually be attributed to small, gradual changes or innovations in situations that are enacted within a specific context by a unique set of individuals / groups.

A week or two after posting this I learned this character in my spoken Chinese class:

流行 = liuxing (pronounced leo-shing)

What’s interesting about this word is that it has two meanings.  The first meaning is popular, fashionable, trendy.  The second meaning is contagious as in an epidemic.

I think the correlation between these two meanings (for the same word) would be of some interest to Mr. Gladwell.  It shows how there is some relationship (even at the linguistic level) for the things that gain interest in the public eye and highly-infectious epidemics.  It made me stop and say, "Hmmmm."

But I still don’t know what the Chinese word for "tipping point" is.  Maybe that’s in next week’s lesson.  (Ha.)